Dancing Painter

It's official, I am sick again. After a fairly uneventful week, I managed to come down with a cold. I woke up with an incredibly sore throat on Monday. I taught on Tuesday and will be spending some quality time with my futon after work over the next few days.

As for this past week, I am finally getting into a routine, so it was just business as usual. On Sunday, I finally checked out Yoyogi Park. It was more than I could have imagined, and my guidebook lied. It said that bands no longer played there, as the neighbors have complained, and it has been banned. There were a lot of bands (little punk trios and quartets), break dancers, flea market vendors, and even a dancing painter. Unfortunately, after getting off at the wrong train stop, I got to Yoyogi late in the afternoon, so most of my pictures didn't turn out well due to the dusk lighting.

One of the many "banned" bands performing on the sidewalk outside of the park. It was kind of like walking through a flea market that was competing with a neighborhood block party.
Here is a picture of the painter in action. He was pretty wild to watch. He got really into it and never skipped a beat, even if the music skipped/stopped. I think I will go back to try to get a video of him during the daylight. I found myself getting completely sucked in, like Kiva gets sucked in by the spray-paint artist on State Street in the summer.

(Okay, so it won't let me load a picture here for the past two days. Just know that I will keep trying over the next few days. The paragraph below is about the picture (I hate you Blogger).)

Finally, in typical Jessica style, I found myself almost making a faux pas. I was trying to help a second grader with her school project by taking her "Flat Whitney" (paper doll) to various sites in Japan and taking pictures. The little girl will later make a scrapbook about Flat Whitney's adventures during the year. I wanted to get a picture in a typical Tokyo setting, so I figured that Shibuya at night would be perfect (lots of neon advertising, etc.). So Linda took our picture on Sunday night, and then we rushed off to catch our last trains. When I got home and uploaded the photos, I noticed that the ad behind me was for some art show featuring paintings of a nearly naked woman. Now this is okay for adults, but is it okay for second graders? I found myself quickly cropping the photo before I e-mailed it off.